Up to the South, This it not Beirut
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Jayce Salloum
Untitled
This new body of work does not use texts per se, but an oblique visual 'narrative' linking conceptual concerns and formal affinities in an installation format of colour photographs shot in New York between 1988 - 1998 and continuing with the inclusion of images shot elsewhere (i.e. Los Angeles, Paris, Holland, Montréal and Vancouver), and the exploration of the possibilities of visualizing the nature of the 'natural' and unnaturally constructed urban and sub-urban environments.
After a 10 year hiatus (during which I was working with 'appropriated' imagery exclusively) from exhibiting or thinking seriously about ‘street’ photography, I returned to it in Lebanon. The series generated there, titled, ‘(sites+) demarcations: ’, was predominately concerned with the place in-between that a photographer in a culture or a landscape is caught. This was a project about how my position as an image maker was situated somewhere between being a family member, visitor, tourist, guide and unwilling orientalist, fluctuating peripatetically between the act of re-producing and the deconstruction of such an act and its object.. placing my own subjectivity in relationship to the apparent issues involved and the instability of identity existing within a diverse culture and the displacement between cultures. The photographs relied on accompanying wall texts to lead the viewer through the levels of information/meaning and the intended references in this inevitable act of re-producing and deconstruction.
Returning from Lebanon (early 1993) I started to consider the images I was making in New York (during 1988-91 and 1993-98), coalescing ideas formulated in Lebanon and extending the style of previous work (made in San Francisco, Toronto, Banff and other locations in Canada from 1975-1981) into a more strategic methodology and specificity of purpose. I viewed the various groups of work as dealing with similar initial approaches and manners of working, akin and aligned to each other formally, but grounded in different social and representational issues, local contexts, varying histories, and impetus. The New York work carried on the attempt to engage itself critically in the representation of cultural manifestations, looking at private and public space, commercial enterprises acting as ideological stage fronts, the tableaux of domestic settings, and the spaces in-between both -- these semi-public areas formulated from very private initiatives in the realms of one’s subjective and physical life.
I viewed New York as a ‘sign’ of the ‘city’ and as a referent to this post-industrial period we are in. In a more specific way the city is seen as a locator and map of identification where specific acts and struggles of representation are played out. These points of contact are found in the details of the street, the transactions and apparatus of commerce and its daily interface, the store windows, the street vendors, the ad campaigns, and the minutiae of visual artifacts filling the machined frame. The placement of objects over time, hand-written signage and other personal contributions of the planned and accidental provide evidence of meaning, gestural improvisations and the revision necessarily attached to comfort and unease. Coincidence and intention are aligned in this pedestrian field of vision that is fed off of as we pass by, the 'real' surmounting the 'simulacra'. In some ways this is a very local(ized) project, exploring the neighbourhoods where I stayed and worked, or passed through frequently. This project also functions within my triangulation of works dealing with lives between countries, at points in the intersection of histories.
This work now takes the form of a complex photo-installation with nearly 100 images of various sizes, there is no text/text panels added, only the text that exists in literal and metaphorical form within the images. The body of work is titled, ‘untitled’, but for each exhibition there will be a temporary title given, which is quoted in the exact font and colour from texts within the photos i.e. NEUTRAL | BRAKES | STEERING (Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Nov-Dec 1998) and 22 oz. THUNDERBOLT (Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Spring 1999). Future titles will include, To The Trade, HOME MADE CHOCOLATE, WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU, Original MvILK-BONE, Jet’s IDEA and Going Out of Business.
The work is and will continue to be attempting to formulate a critical position to the tradition of documentary, perhaps best seen in my recent work in; the formal approaches/aesthetic used, the framing of the ‘tableaux’, the relationship of image to the corporeal (body) and in the quotidian (daily life) encounters, familiarity of content, the importance of the vernacular/photographs as a vernacular 'language' exploding the still current bias/disdain against the vernacular form from the street/ground on 'up', the assumed expectations of the photograph(s) and viewer, the mode of display within the image, the setting up of the space and the ambiguity of positioning of the viewer in relationship to the layers in the photographs themselves, between the domestic and public spaces, in the private and subjectively undermined commercial enterprises, and in the final installation/exhibition itself. I was and still am trying to go further than a symbolically stated street photography relying on the fetish of the 'moment(ary)' (simultaneity, coincidence, serendipity etc.) into a more conceptual and theoretical arena of the investigation of visual culture while maintaining direct ties to the actual social referent.
At the same time the provisional feeling/look of many of the images and installation is important to allow a specific multi-layered field of inquiry to be developed without the rigidity of an over-determined reading being imposed. The saturated lusciousness of many of the images is intentional lending an attitude of reaffirment via visual stimuli. The pictures are as much about the ‘reading’ of them and working with or challenging this act, the act of perception, as they are about the content being constructed or framed. I am after the shifting in the reading that this kind of (dis)framing will allow, the sliding and defining of ‘inherent’ meaning and content from one image to the next and to other surrounding images (and image clusters) and to the overall relationship with the whole piece. This slippage works within (and sometimes beyond) the fields set up by the ‘narratives’ in a hypertextual relationship to encourage lateral thinking/reading of the photographs, allowing shifting methodologies and manners of decoding to be engaged or interacted with.
These photographs are exhibited in an installation format, the images in varying sizes (5" x 7" to 30" x 40",) hung behind unframed glass/plexi, playing off each other in visual and conceptual narratives (please see sample diagram/map enclosed). There will be no wall texts. I intend for the work to be an ongoing piece which will vary chronologically and spatially.
A catalogue of this work will be published in the spring of 1999 by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston.